ENHANCING THE THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY OF PHASE CHANGE MATERIALS USING NANOMATERIALS

Abstract

As buildings make up of approximately 40% of the world’s energy consumption, especially in terms of the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems that take up as high as at least 60% of the total energy consumed in buildings (Akeiber et al., 2016), efficient energy management measures have become the sustainable way forward. Thermal energy storage systems that make use of phase change materials (PCM) have drawn much attention with the high potential savings that building owners can achieved. However, most studies have reflected that the performance of PCM applications are highly limited by their poor thermal conductivity that impacts the efficiency and capacity of the systems. With the emergence of nanotechnology, research focus has been put on enhancing the thermal conductivities of PCM through the use of nanomaterials as their enhancers. In this study, it has been discovered that carbon black nanoparticles can be dispersed rather uniformly in paraffin wax and the enhancement factor of nano-PCM composites can be achieved up to 59.17% with 20 wt% of nano-carbon particles. Results from computational fluid dynamics simulations conducted in this study also show that thermophysical properties of the nano-PCM composites such as density, thermal conductivity, heat capacity, thermal expansion coefficient and viscosity also vary with the concentrations of nano-enhancers